King Lear at the Adobe Theater

By Steven Robert Allen

After having his eyeballs gouged out by the Earl of Cornwall, the Earl of Gloucester utters one of the most memorable lines in King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.” Given the compounded misery stuffed into this gruesome play, you might think that's the lesson here. You'd be wrong.

Interventions

For more than 50 years now, MIT linguist Noam Chomsky has been a skeptic of states—in particular, the United States—and how they use power. Why should a language guy care about such matters? "Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments,” he explained in his 1969 essay collection American Power and the New Mandarins. And as residents of a free country, he concluded, American intellectuals have even more responsibility to wisely use their freedom to expose the abuse of official power.